A global race is on to “mobilize” banking. Banks around the world have been working furiously to improve their mobile applications and optimize their websites for customers’ smartphones and tablets. Yet the race has just begun. Leading banks are still learning how to take a mobile-first approach to reimagine customer experiences in everything from buying a home to resolving an incident of fraud. By migrating customers to digital channels, banks have begun to reap significant cost savings as they drive bad and avoidable interactions (generated by errors or better routed to lower-cost and more convenient digital channels) out of the branch and call center. And the benefits extend well beyond cost. Mobile channels are far more likely to delight and less likely to annoy than [...]

The falling cost of software and equipment is helping digital technology spread to parts of the economy that were never possible before. Customers have been some of the biggest beneficiaries of innovation in business today. Chris Brahm, a partner in Bain's Digital practice, explains how in in this short video.

"Our customers have gotten way ahead of our sales efforts. Too often, in fact, we’re not even getting invited to the dance!" It’s a common lament among CMOs and heads of sales for business-to-business (B2B) firms. These executives face two major challenges. First, the wealth of information available from online sources has given customers more power. Buyers perform more than two-thirds of their decision-making research online before they even contact a vendor. A company’s digital footprint now serves as its showroom and helps determine whether it makes the short list of vendors long before it even knows a customer is in the market. Yet while the websites of traditional B2B companies often overflow with product features, they offer few perspectives about how the products actually [...]

If you’re trying to maximize the performance of your digital marketing campaigns, experimental design goes far beyond the traditional champion/challenger approach known as A/B testing. What limits A/B testing is the fact that you can test only a few variables at any one time, so you have to do many tests in order to determine the best combinations. Experimental design massively increases the variables that digital marketers can test simultaneously—product offers, website design, merchandising, messages, incentives, interstitials displayed before or after an expected content page, calls to action, and so on. The effect of all these variables can be determined by testing just a few combinations and then using mathematical formulas to model the impact of all the possible combinations. Experimentally designed marketing campaigns have [...]

India stands on the cusp of dramatic growth in Internet and e-commerce activity. While Internet penetration today is only a third of that in the other three BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia and China), we anticipate rapid growth over the next few years, with more than 650 million Indians online by 2020—which would make India second only to China in projected Internet users. Many of these users will be women and “digital natives,” born during or after the introduction of digital technologies. As a result, the retail environment and shopping practices of everyday Indian consumers will change in ways that older generations might find hard to imagine, creating tremendous opportunities. By 2020, these Internet users will generate more than US$50 billion in total online sales. As [...]

Providing a great experience for customers has become a credo for many companies today. They realize that a great end-to-end experience will attract and retain customers, as well as engage the enthusiasm and creativity of employees. Customers still want a wireless plan, auto insurance policy or a mortgage with the right features at the right price, but increasingly they also expect at least a convenient, and possibly special, experience surrounding the product or service. And they want interactions to be seamless across physical and digital channels. Bain & Company analysis shows that companies that excel in the customer experience grow revenues 4%–8% above their market. That’s because a superior experience helps to earn stronger loyalty among customers, turning them into promoters who tend to buy [...]